The Man with the Withered Hand

What I wanted to write about when I started the last post was the gospel reading from today's Mass: Mark 3:1-6. 

We have in the scene the Pharisees, Jesus, his disciples, the crowd, and in the crowd a man with crippling paralysis in his hand. When the scene starts, we already know that the Pharisees are looking for somewhere to hang their accusations against Jesus. So when the man with the paralyzed hand becomes a character, his problem becomes simply staging for them. So right off the bat, the Pharisees have a dehumanization problem. And this makes Jesus angry. The text says he is grieved at how hard their hearts are. Clearly they don't perceive the Creator in Jesus, but they don't even show him human respect. And the need of the man doesn't register with them, either. In their hardness of heart they are only concerned with their laws and rules, which is where they find their security, and where they want to find their justification for getting rid of Jesus, who seems to already have pushed buttons they didn't know how to handle.

So the Pharisees are not moved with pity for the need of the man, or for him as an individual. Jesus, however, calls on the man to stand up and take a side. He, Jesus, is wanting to restore him to wholeness, and he calls for the man to act in trust -- stretch out your hand. Yep, that thing that has caused you all your trouble, hold it out for everyone to see. The Pharisees want the man to side with them -- healing on the Sabbath breaks the command! It's not supposed to happen this way! Stop with your wanting to be whole. Stifle that, listen to us, and ignore Jesus. 

But the voice of Jesus, Creator God, speaks into the desire in the man. Become who you were made to be -- whole -- even if it upsets religious propriety. 

He stretched out his hand. 

And the hand was restored.

Because he recognized the voice of the Creator/Redeemer/Restorer in this "unauthorized" rabbi.

And the man's act of faith became of the reasons Jesus' death was plotted for. He let it be known that God was here, being God, and that was more than the Pharisees were able to stomach.

One could draw parallels "out there" in the world or in the church, but really one need go no further than one's own heart to find the paralyzed man, the Pharisees, and the call of the Lord to make a decision of faith. Do I want to be whole more than I fear displeasing the voice of condemnation?

Embodied

"New year, new me" came with a jolt this year. It was as if the Lord woke me at midnight and said: Ok dear, buckle up. We're going for a ride right now, and you are going to need a few things for this trip -- here. 

And we were off, while I was still blinking and not even at the point where I could say I wasn't prepared for this. 

So I have a list of about 11 things that I've been incorporating into my weeks (has it been weeks already?), and one of these is from a website called EmbodiedCatholicWoman.com, called the Heart Safety Toolkit. God bless the Facebook ad that knew I was looking at resolving trauma on a somatic level. Sometimes intrusive marketing is helpful. 

At several turns in my adult life, people have told me that I need to get in touch with my feelings. My response was generally a raised eyebrow and an "ok..." because honestly I knew I had feelings. I felt them all the time, often to an overwhelming degree. I couldn't deny that I'm of an intellectual bent. Most of me shrugged off this entreaty, while the rest of me squirmed a bit, wondering if I'm just not really woman enough. 

Honestly, I had no idea how to do get into this "touch" they talked about. No one ever explained it to me. And though I am deeply intuitive, sometimes I need things spelled out super clearly before I get it, because I just don't have the ability to leap into whatever assumption the speaker is making.

Claudine at Embodied Catholic Woman spells it out, scientifically. Essentially, our bodies can go into different "gears" in response to trauma or chronic stress. These gears hang between our psychology and our physical bodies, and the effects go both ways. The key to resolving what trauma triggers is to become observers of thoughts, feelings, sensations that happen inside our bodies, and do certain physical things that can reset us over time physically and psychologically, to be better able to navigate the challenges that life brings. When we don't reset but stay in a gear where we are either unable to deal, or are hyper-dealing, we are left less and less capable of that kind of navigation, and we instead develop all kinds of unhealthy coping mechanisms, and we become knotty, and maybe even sick, people. 

So it hasn't been so much that I have needed to become more emotional as it is I have needed to become more embodied. By that, I mean to observe: this is what I feel happening in my body right now and eventually move to this is what I can do in response. In the past it was more like I feel x; I am x and it was as if there was no escape. So I would just avoid feeling x, by force, if necessary. Like that link I shared above about the "threat" of the women's Bible study at church. The only solution I could come up with was to guilt myself into not feeling what I felt. Or, one better, to accept, with some sadness, the way I am. What these somatic exercises have taught me (and the Lord, throwing this at me as we left on this trip) is that there's a stopping point between what I feel and who I am. And I can go there and actually accept what I feel into the fuller picture of who God made me. What a concept. I'm 57 years old, but it's better late than never to figure this out. 

This need became screamingly evident as I sat writing an email to a friend one evening, quite in a panic. I put my head in my hands and said out loud, "I'm becoming my father." What I heard was someone in a high state of anxiety, doing the social equivalent of desperately reaching for numbing alcohol to erase the pain, instead of taking courage to face it. (I'm currently reading The Shining as an exploration of the psyche of the dry drunk; more on that after I finish it, maybe.) This state of mind was, frankly, modeled to me by the adults in my life throughout my childhood, and had come to be somewhat emotionally normal for me, though I had not experienced it myself in decades. That was the moment I realized I needed what I was about to find in Claudine a few days later. 

Ok, so none of this was what I came here to even write about, but there we have it. Between Claudine and Manuela Mitevova and her somatic practices I am learning how to be whole. Now we give it time, work, and continued prayer.

Confessions of a Closet Gnostic

As soon as I type "closet gnostic" I am anticipating one of my more intellectual readers taking me to task for theological imprecision, so right off the bat I am going to invite those feelings of Precision Demand to go outside and attend to their own domain, like monitoring the Earth's orbit around the sun, or whatever it is they are for. I'm here to speak a bit more poetically.

The gnostic I'm talking about is the one who says knowledge is the savior, and secret knowledge is for the superior elite (understood as themselves), and this invisible realm is where all Good resides. The body, matter, and that thereto connected is deeply suspect. An apparent necessary evil, to be escaped or avoided. Slapped on to a Christian package, this encourages practices such as spiritualizing: when one avoids dealing with matters that originate in the material world by framing them as having exclusively spiritual origins and solutions. 

I'd say the opposite of this gnosticism is the Incarnation of Christ, and all of its ramifications. 

And I think I am still a recovering gnostic. 

It isn't so much that I started out being an enemy of my body or anyone elses, or the material world. But very early on I became an enemy of my emotions. I suddenly I feel like I've been dropped into a movie a little bit like The Kid where I am being invited to meet Small Child Me, or even Young Adult Me, and renegotiate a few things. 

One of the things I need to renegotiate is the reality that emotions give information, and emotions are experienced in the body -- and stored there unhealthfully if they don't make it all the way through to expression. 

I've been doing some somatic exercises lately, and I've just recently started a new set of practices designed to address traumatic experiences. This latter thing was designed by a Catholic woman for Catholic women, and now that I am finally actually open to something like this, I'm finding it very powerful. I have always kind of shifted uncomfortably in my chair when people would suggest, for example, beginning your prayer with taking deep breaths or being aware of your body in the space, etc. It just seemed too "woo-woo" to me. Intellectual things are my comfort zone, and all this body talk just seemed, I dunno, suspicious. 

But what is the case is that as a child, I spent a lot of time in extremely tense environments. Parents arguing, parents divorcing, my father being so sad and miserable, my mom being so stressed, hiding at the neighbors house with my mom when they split up, Then there was my dad drinking, and when he would get drunk, he would call our house, and that telephone became terror activation. Mostly my Mom would yell at him and slam the phone down, or sometimes he would ask to talk to me, and I'd be stuck on the phone listening to him drunk rant. I don't know how many times that happened, but in my memory it feels like a lot. Of course, we'd never know when he'd start drinking, so sometimes the phone ringing was just the phone ringing, and sometimes it wasn't. Sometimes he'd talk to me when he was sober, but those conversations were usually apologies, and they were short. I remember one time, in the midst of my dad's phone calls, one of my sister's college friends happened to call, and my mom yelled something about "operator, trace this call" and hung up. When we learned later who actually had been on the other end, the whole thing became something to laugh about. That was so weird and confusing. 

I remember this happening at least through to my teenage years. I suppose it became part of the normal warp and woof of my life. And it had a lot to do with why I shut down my emotions and ignored how this made me feel. It transferred over to basically numbing myself around other people entirely.

I have a memory from about age 19 that tells me how far I got with this. I had a friend at the time who was in her 30s, and she had two small kids, around ages 3 and 5. I started appearing at this friend's house somewhat frequently, as we were becoming Bible study buddies. One day when I arrived, her daughter, the younger child, greeted me at the door with an exuberant hug of my legs. I stood there, stiff as a board, and looked at her rather expressionlessly. I remember her face melting from a bright smile to something akin to utter fright, as she backed away from me. I had absolutely no idea how to respond to her, and she felt how abnormal that was, even though I couldn't. 

Now, things have changed for me a lot. But I am finding there are some areas I still need to renegotiate and allowing myself to listen to my body and the emotions that do commerce there is not, after all, poppycock. I even have to retrain my intellect (aka learn!) to accept this as important information, and to make some shifts. 

I've tried to erase my humanity, thinking that this is more spiritual. I'm pretty sure my prayer journals from past decades are filled with ridiculous and elaborate spiritual theories about why such and so was happening to me, when it really boiled down to: I'm not managing my emotions here. I'm denying my humanity over here. I'm avoiding addressing this conflict over here. I don't have all of the facts straight over there. It's not all about God testing me and it's definitely not all spiritual warfare and attacks of the devil, or elaborate communications from the Holy Spirit. Nor is it about my need to just try harder or beat myself up over stuff, or any other elaborate heap of chaff I've been able to create. So much froth, so little Incarnational Lord. 

He is, however, incredibly patient with me. 

This morning, I read the first Psalm from the Office of Readings (for the Baptism of the Lord). I found it striking.

O give the Lord, you sons of God,
give the Lord glory and power;
give the Lord the glory of his name.
Adore the Lord in his holy court.

The Lord's voice resounding on the waters,
the Lord on the immensity of waters;
the voice of the Lord, full of power,
the voice of the Lord, full of splendor.

The Lord's voice shattering the cedars,
The Lord shatters the cedars of Lebanon;
he makes Lebanon leap like a calf
and Sirion like a young wild-ox

The Lord's voice flashes flames of fire.

The Lord's voice shaking the wilderness,
The Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh;
the Lord's voice rending the oak tree
and stripping the forest bare.

The God of glory thunders.
In his temple they all cry: "Glory!"
The Lord sat enthroned over the flood;
The Lord sits as king forever.

The Lord will give strength to his people,
The Lord will bless his people with peace.

If this isn't physical imagery, I don't know what is. My embedded emotional paralysis can feel as immovable as a cedar of Lebanon, or like the very land itself, but the voice of the Lord currently speaking over me, I know, has the power to break that spell of death, and replace it with strength and peace. 

Re-defining Safety

This morning, Fr. A. preached about how, when you are going through a seriously trying time (like with his sister who just lost her son) you cannot rely on what you think or what you feel about God or anything. You have to rely on what you know. (The reading from 1 John used the phrase "we know" several times.)

That's true for me right now. 

I can't even put into words what the last three weeks or so have brought to pass to make me feel like What the hell just hit me? I know that these are the days that I will look back on in the future as a major transition for the positive. I know it because I know God is good. I know it because of the conversations we have back and forth and that He has never, ever brought me anything but good. 

But for now, I am sitting with a new light shining. It feels dark. Like practically blinding. My heart is suddenly incredibly exposed to myself and all of my judgmental bearings are sort of in free-fall. I feel like every trauma I've ever known is retriggered, though because I'm aware of it, it's also true that in real time I am learning how to regulate, and that I need to. It's not optional. I just feel incredibly vulnerable, especially in the interior and exterior settings that had felt the most solid and secure just not that terribly long ago.

But at the same time, I am more surrounded with support than I ever have been in my life. Honestly, I chalk much of this spiritual movement up to the Spiritual Direction formation program I'm in. My life has become the curriculum and my Interior Teacher is hard at work. I have people. But there's no way through but through. My core is at peace but my nervous system is in massive flight mode. It's not pretty and frankly it is scary to mentally be back in places I left long ago.

I remember vividly one of the last sessions of my SDFP training in September, when a group of five of us were doing a contemplative practice together. We were given various passages to read, 20 minutes of solitude, then we were to come back together and share about what had struck us. I did not even get the entire first sentence of the first passage read, and it had hit me like a ton of bricks, and even after the 20 minutes and into sharing about it, it was still powerfully rocking me, and the line was this: "At the heart of the Carmelite Rule there is a call for us to commit ourselves to Jesus..." It hit me like an intensely personal call, and I thought of Aslan, how the child asks if he is safe. Oh, no. No one said anything about safe. He's not a tame lion -- but he is good. 

I have maintained myself in a kind of safety. For sanity, we all need safety. But humanly-built safety can smother and suffocate. I think God is calling me to something more akin to His definition of safety, which is going to take a lot of faith, trust, letting go and hanging on. And just simple openness to that which I don't know. 

But it is worth it, isn't it. To be with the King. It's worth anything.